The strife indeed which Langland would have averted raged only the fiercer as the dark years went by.  If the Statutes of Labourers were powerless for their immediate ends, either in reducing the actual rate of wages or in restricting the mass of floating labour to definite areas of employment, they proved effective in sowing hatred between employer and employed, between rich and poor.  But this social rift was not the only rift which was opening amidst the distress and misery of the time.  The close of William Langland’s poem is the prophecy of a religious revolution; and the way for such a revolution was being paved by the growing bitterness of strife between England and the Papacy.  In spite of the sharp protests from king and parliament the need for money at Avignon was too great to allow any relaxation in the Papal claims.  Almost on the eve of Crecy Edward took the decisive step of forbidding the entry into England of any Papal bulls or documents interfering with the rights of presentation belonging to private patrons.  But the tenacity of Rome was far from loosening its grasp on this source of revenue for all Edward’s protests.  Crecy however gave a new boldness to the action of the State, and a Statute of Provisors was passed by the Parliament in 1351 which again asserted the rights of the English Church and enacted that all who infringed them by the introduction of Papal “provisors” should suffer imprisonment.  But resistance to provisors only brought fresh vexations.  The patrons who withstood a Papal nominee in the name of the law were summoned to defend themselves in the Papal Court.  From that moment the supremacy of the Papal law over the law of the land became a great question in which the lesser question of provisors merged.  The pretension of the Court of Avignon was met in 1353 by a statute which forbade any questioning of judgements rendered in the King’s Courts or any prosecution of a suit in foreign courts under pain of outlawry, perpetual imprisonment, or banishment from the land.  It was this act of Praemunire—­as it came in after renewals to be called—­which furnished so terrible a weapon to the Tudors in their later strife with Rome.  But the Papacy paid little heed to these warnings, and its obstinacy in still receiving suits and appeals in defiance of this statute roused the pride of a conquering people.  England was still fresh from her glory at Bretigny when Edward appealed to the Parliament of 1365.  Complaints, he said, were constantly being made by his subjects to the Pope as to matters which were cognizable in the King’s Courts.  The practice of provisors was thus maintained in the teeth of the laws, and “the laws, usages, ancient customs, and franchises of his kingdom were thereby much hindered, the King’s crown degraded, and his person defamed.”  The king’s appeal was hotly met.  “Biting words,” which it was thought wise to suppress, were used in the debate which followed, and the statutes against provisors and appeals were solemnly confirmed.